The reply arrived just two hours later: a man showed up at Elizabeth’s hotel room carrying two suitcases containing $2 million, in cash. Elizabeth was flabbergasted and immediately rang Bautzer. “Please, thank Howard on my behalf and tell him I’m flattered. But I’m afraid money will never keep me warm at night . . .”
The story had the flavor of a full-on Hollywood fable, and it was the first time I doubted something that Elizabeth told me. But I was wrong. A few years later I became friends with Greg Bautzer, so I got the chance to ask him about the story, without letting on that I’d already heard it from Elizabeth. It turned out to be entirely true. I’ve always admired Elizabeth’s romantic soul and tried to portray it in my photos whenever possible. I believe this trait explains why she married and remarried so often. She may have adored her jewels, but she never cared about money. Or fame, which she’d known all her life. She just wanted to be loved and respected. And when it didn’t work out, she married again, as soon as possible. And then gave herself heart and soul to the new person she loved.
Once Elizabeth saw a story about me in a magazine. For some reason, the picture that ran with the story was of me and my former fiancee, Patrizia. When Elizabeth asked me who she was, I explained how we’d been engaged before Pierluigi sent me to Africa. Elizabeth was shocked. “You mean you slept with her?” she asked. “You were engaged and you didn’t marry her? Why?” All I could say was that I’d met my soulmate in Claudye. But that didn’t seem acceptable to Elizabeth. “I’ve never had lovers,” Elizabeth explained. “I always marry the men I go to bed with, sometimes before, sometimes after.”
To Richard and Elizabeth’s immense delight, Charles Schulz (far right), the Peanuts cartoon creator, dropped by one day in Mexico, so totally unannounced that they almost turned him away.
Elizabeth and Richard had time to kill before their next movie, so they decided to take the family and entourage on vacation to their place in Mexico, Casa Kimberley, near Puerto Vallarta. It was on a private beach in Bucerias, some ten miles outside the city. They had a dune buggy there that just refused to work. I spent weeks tinkering with the engine and eventually managed to get it going, which was when I taught their sons, Michael and Christopher, to drive. We had a lot of fun, and one day we were out whizzing across the desert at top speed when another buggy appeared, coming up behind us like he wanted to race. He did everything he could to get by, but I kept cutting him off. We kept this game up for a while—or what seemed like a game to me—till the guy suddenly changed the rules and pulled out a gun. That’s Mexico for you. I let him pass. What a pity I didn’t have a camera. He was a dead ringer for Pancho Villa.
One day I was heading out to buy milk when two middle-aged American guys turned up asking to see Elizabeth. I began trying to explain that she was unavailable when the guy doing the talking explained that he was Charles Schulz, the man behind Peanuts, the Charlie Brown cartoon. The moment Elizabeth heard, she and Richard rushed out to greet their distinguished guest and his friend. They were both huge Charlie Brown fans and over the moon at his visit.
Elizabeth was looking so relaxed and beautiful that she was almost unrecognizable. Free from makeup, hairstyles, and set costumes, she spent her days laughing and joking with everyone. The holiday was clearly doing her a world of good.
Elizabeth, on holiday on their Bucerias beach in Mexico, hides buck naked behind Richard, having just lost her swimsuit in the surf.
Elizabeth playing with her son Michael and one of his friends (opposite)—and enjoying the company of a local bird.
Then one day her peace and quiet were shattered. Elizabeth and Richard were out on the beach when possibly the world’s most persistent paparazzo, Ron Galella, shot Elizabeth in a pose that no woman would like to get caught in. He made her look fat, with rolls on her stomach. All Elizabeth had wanted to do was relax a bit by the sea. She had no idea Galella was lurking behind a tree playing Peeping Tom. His photo went around the world, tagged pretty much the same everywhere: “The world’s most beautiful woman is through!” Elizabeth was so angry she even lost her sense of humor. The truth is, she felt wounded.
In the wake of Galella’s photo, everyone lost interest in my pictures of Elizabeth. Whenever I had new ones I’d send them for publication through all the usual channels. But no one published them. None of the editors believed they told the truth. “It’s all light tricks and touch-ups,” they’d say. “You’re not telling the truth with these photos.” Thanks to Galella, the only photos anyone wanted of Elizabeth now were ugly ones. No one cared anymore whether she was beautiful or not. The world just wanted to see her at her worst.
It seemed that my job, hard enough as it was to begin with, had just become even harder. Elizabeth trusted me to curate her image, and I had always tried to make the world see her as if for the first time. Now I had to find a way to do it all over again. Which I did, eventually. But it took time, while other affairs kept me busy.
Relaxing in Mexico, my wife Claudye watches Elizabeth trounce Richard at arm wrestling, 1971. I took the photos with an Instamatic bought in a local store.
Chapter 9
The Artist in Me
Claudye and I were living between Rome and Paris when I got hired as special photographer on the set of Les Novices, a French movie starring Brigitte Bardot. I’d just gifted myself with one of the Ford Mustangs used in the 1968 Peter Yates thriller, Bullitt, starring Steve McQueen (in possibly the most thrilling car-chase sequence in movie history). I used it to go to the set on the first day of shooting, and was just parking when I spotted Bardot on a Solex scooter with a stray dog running alongside her. I snapped these shots from the car.
She saw me, came over, and asked what kind of car it was. I explained, opened the passenger door, and in she got, wearing the most splendidly mini miniskirt. I looked at her legs and smiled. She looked at the speedometer and asked if the car really would go that fast. When I nodded that it would, she asked me to take her for a ride. Which I promptly did, pulling out all the stops, swerving into bends at the last moment. She bounced right over and hopped straight into my lap, squealing with excitement. Without meaning to, or unconsciously, one of my hands strayed, caressing her. We got to the auberge (a bed-and-breakfast of the time), where she was staying, went in, got a drink, and went upstairs. When we finally returned to the set, everyone was waiting for us. “If I give you my number, will you call me?” she asked, to which I replied by offering her my hand and a pen.
When shortly afterward we met on set, me lugging my equipment and shoulder bag, she did a double take and then looked embarrassed. She’d taken me for just another good-looking guy around town, not the special photographer. In any case, the atmosphere was decidedly grim. Everyone was irritated by Brigitte’s late arrival, plus the way she was paying far more attention to me than the director. I felt so uneasy that I only stayed a couple of hours.
Brigitte Bardot took me for a nobody and took me to bed, much to her embarrassment when she later found me on her set as the special photographer for Guy Casaril’s 1970 movie Les Novices.
I know it may sound crazy—Brigitte was one of the greatest sex symbols of all time—but I wasn’t particularly attracted to her. She was intoxicated by celebrity in a way that was totally foreign to Elizabeth and Richard. After that one encounter in France, I always kept my distance, partly because I felt so guilty in front of Claudye. Whenever I did bump into her, I made sure my animal instincts were on a short leash.
Once Brigitte leaned out over my hotel balcony and said, “If I came out here naked, the whole town would stop to watch.” If she hadn’t been so taken by her fame, she might have become a good actress. But maybe she just loved being a sex symbol, and that was enough. What stimulated her was other people’s attention, not any need for artistic expression. And I’m not sure whether she even had anything to express, besides her extraordinary beauty. I sensed in her an unsettling air of danger. During the first months of my association with Elizabeth and Richard I quit
e possibly might not have noticed anything other than her charm. But I was more adapted to my new life now, and had acquired a more critical eye. Watching Brigitte on my balcony, intent on only herself, I saw a hidden side to her, just as I saw a hidden side to Richard when he went on one of his drinking binges. But with Richard’s self-brutalizing, I saw a deep inner conflict between his fame and his aspirations as an actor. Getting close to Bardot revealed no more than her emptiness.
Elizabeth and Richard were still on a break from work, so I had to find something to do. “Now pedal!” I thought, and got the idea of doing a photo shoot featuring Europe’s leading fashion designers: Courreges, Ungaro, Givenchy, Nina Ricci, Paco Rabanne. Deciding to start at the top, I called Coco Chanel’s office, even though it was universally known that she hated being photographed. But I got an appointment to meet with one of her PR men in her atelier, where I explained that I wanted to photograph her for my agency archives because I thought she was the best designer in the world. The answer was no. He seemed unmovable. Then his in-house phone rang, and suddenly the answer changed to yes. Coco had been watching me from the upper floor. The staircase to her office had mirrored walls, which allowed her to follow what was going on below. I guess she liked what she saw because she invited me to do the shoot in her home in Switzerland. That seemed a bit strange to me, especially since I’d wanted to photograph her while she worked. But knowing just how many photographers she’d turned down in the past, I accepted.
I got to Coco’s home, between Geneva and Lausanne in Switzerland, a few weeks later. She immediately started flirting openly with me and laughing almost hysterically. Her PR man looked on dumbfounded. She told him to leave. She wanted us to be alone. Coco was eighty-five at the time, still very attractive, fascinating, and sharp witted. I took a few photos. She lavished me with compliments, then sat on my lap, kissed me on the mouth, and asked me if I’d like to marry her. I hugged her the way you hug your grandmother, and she immediately invited me to dinner in her apartment in the Hotel Ritz Carlton. When I got home that night I told Claudye about Coco’s proposal, and she replied, laughing, “I’ll happily let her have you, but don’t forget me.”
Coco Chanel, eighty-five, did more than agree to be photographed—she invited me home for a tête-à-tête.
When Coco Chanel invited me to photograph her in her chalet in Switzerland, I hardly expected to be hugged, kissed, and asked for my hand in marriage . . .
The following day, Coco called and repeated her invitation to the Ritz. Claudye couldn’t stop laughing. On the day of our appointment, Coco greeted me in her dressing gown. She weighed maybe eighty pounds. I believe I photographed her with more freedom than anyone else had been granted, maybe because she enjoyed the way I used my camera to provoke her. She again asked me to marry her. I again tried to laugh it off. This was a woman said to have slept with some of the world’s most influential men, yet she never married a single one. When asked why she had turned down even the vastly wealthy Duke of Westminster, she reportedly replied, “There have been many Duchesses of Westminster. There is only one Coco Chanel.”
I asked Coco who she thought was going to be the next “Coco Chanel.” “All these women,” she replied caustically, “they get dressed by men that hate them.” In truth there really was no other female designer ready to take Chanel’s place, and in stark contrast to today, people in the fashion industry still looked askance at the idea of gay men making clothes for women.
That marriage proposal may have been wild, but there was something serious in her tone all the same. Later, when I took Coco my photos, she treated me in a much more reserved manner, as if she were angry with me. The fashion industry in Paris was going through something of a crisis at the time. I could only figure that maybe Coco had hoped she and I would be caught in a compromising situation and thus spark a huge scandal that would generate some much-needed publicity. As it happens, Catherine Deneuve was in the building that day. Coco did everything she could to keep us apart, even though she knew we knew each other. It was as if she were jealous. I left Coco with a number of photos, and as I was leaving, she invited me to a party. I didn’t go. Months later I met her again. She was very sick and didn’t recognize me.
I never did finish my fashion designers shoot. After photographing Coco Chanel, I lost interest in doing any of the others. She was a legend. I’d have felt I was going downhill after her. Plus, I didn’t understand that world. I’ve never understood haute couture, all those unwearable clothes. Maybe I’ve just never possessed the necessary extravagance to work in high fashion.
Nevertheless, extravagance kept coming my way. On a brief visit to Rome, Klaus Kinski phoned. We’d met during the shooting of A Fistful of Dollars. He wanted me to do a photo shoot for him alone. He turned up wearing a skin-tight pair of pants—you could tell immediately that he’d padded the crotch. Klaus wanted to be photographed as a new James Dean. We went to a park where he started strutting around like a cowboy, doing a horrible version of a young American rebel. There was no way I could squeeze James Dean out of that German arrogance, that gloomy expression, that lined face. I’m a good photographer, but not that good.
Kinski showed me absolutely no respect. He kept correcting my technique, arguing about my angles and his stupid poses. “Look,” I said eventually. “You’re the subject, not the artist. I decide what to do.” I told him that if he didn’t like the photos, he could throw them away. Or whatever. I couldn’t care less. There was no other way. His movements were totally out of sync with the expression on his face and the clothes he was wearing. It just wasn’t going to work. When all he could do was sneer, I added, “Listen, if you follow me and do what I say . . .” But I got interrupted. “No,” he said, “nobody tells me what to do.” So I began packing my stuff away. At which point he blurted out, “Okay, we’ll do it your way. I know it won’t work, but we’ll try it all the same.”
In a more mature phase of my career, the shoot with Kinski would have gone better. At some stage I realized that the best way to control my subjects was to ask for a big advance. For some reason that I’ve never quite understood, when egocentrics like Kinski pay in advance, they let me work. It’s as if they want to get as much for their money as possible. “I’ll pay,” they say, “but I won’t lift a finger. You have to do all the work.” Which is exactly what I want anyway. The less they do—pose, try to look cool, pad their crotch—the better the photos turn out. But Kinski just wouldn’t listen. He had no intention of changing those stupid pants or quitting those ridiculous poses. When he saw the photos, he called to tell me that he didn’t like them and that he’d probably made a mistake in hiring me. I told him he was right. I wasn’t the person he needed to take the photos he wanted. I wished him good luck in finding someone more suitable.
However, maybe he didn’t despise my work so much after all because a couple of weeks later he called asking me to photograph his daughter, Nastassja. I refused. The way he did things was too irritating. Over the years, I’ve since seen many photos of Klaus, and I don’t believe he ever found the photographer he was looking for. He was no James Dean, that’s for sure. Though he wasn’t the only one out there trying to be.
This became clear after I got a call from the publicist for Le Mans, an action movie that director Lee Katsin was making based on the city’s famous twenty-four-hour sports car race. They wanted to hire me as special photographer on the movie. But I wasn’t interested so I submitted an exaggerated fee, much higher than my usual rate. The producers didn’t bat an eye. So off I went to France. On my first day on set I saw a motorbike coming toward me. The rider was the movie’s star, Steve McQueen. There—I thought—is a real James Dean kind of guy, and I grabbed my camera and took a shot. McQueen promptly told the crew to throw me off the set, only becoming even more furious when they explained that I’d been hired as the special photographer. Nobody, it seems, had asked his opinion. I told the publicist that unless McQueen apologized I wouldn’t take another photo. McQueen re
fused. I stood my ground, gave them the only photo I’d taken, and spent the next four weeks playing cards with the cast and crew. Nobody seemed to care. I’d respected my contract with that one photo and my presence on the set, and nobody bothered to send me home.
Watching me have fun with the stuntmen and doubles, seeing me the object of so much attention, made McQueen yet angrier. I even test-drove a few of the cars used in the movie. One day I took a Porsche out on the track and overtook McQueen. He was a good driver, but so was I. I passed him and he accelerated, trying and failing to pass me. McQueen was no happier to see me spending so much time with his costar, Elga Andersen. One day I was photographing her far from the set when I saw him watching us. I snapped a shot of him and kept it for myself. That was Le Mans. They paid me to drive sports cars, play cards with my friends, and flirt with a good-looking actress under Steve McQueen’s surly gaze. Making movies can be a weird business at times.
When I told Richard the story—that they’d paid me a boatload of money to do nothing—he found it ridiculous too. A couple of months later in Los Angeles, in our regular Beverly Hills Hotel bungalow, I saw McQueen come into the Polo Lounge. I told Richard, who called and asked to speak with Steve, inviting him to drop round after lunch. When Steve knocked, I answered the door. I could see at once that he remembered me. He stepped over to greet Richard, who immediately asked, “You’ve met Gianni, haven’t you?” Richard’s sense of humor was always at its best when it came to embarrassing others, especially me. “Yes,” Steve replied. “I imagine I owe him an apology.” “What for?” I said. “That was the best-paid job I’ve ever done. I should thank you!”
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